Got this old but very popular game I wanted to play. It’s a Windows game, but not only that, the version I have is the simplified chinese version of it (I can read it, but not as good as traditional).

I was “lucky” and got someone else’s Windows XP box to try and see if it runs, and it doesn’t. It starts up and says it needs the version of the game only works on a simplified chinese version of Windows. Then I thought, I’ve seen similar problems with other programs. Let me try fiddling with those locale and default language and encoding settings in the control panel, not to mention that I need to reboot Windows almost after every change of the settings. However, none of the changes helped. The game still won’t run. And because you could ask, no, we don’t have a simplified version of Windows.

I know for the fact that the game actually runs under WINE pretty well (good thing being an old game I guess), so I gave it a go. Installation worked. Then when I run it, yup, got the same simplified chinese version error. But there’s something different. The texts of the error dialog box are all garbage. I imagine they’re simplified chinese, but somehow not using the right font or encoding. I decided to fix this problem first, which I knew it would be easy cos I have had same problems with other chinese games before. All you need is to set LANG, in this case, to zh_CN.

And guess what, that not only solves the chinese encoding issue, that also convinces the game to think I’m on simplified chinese version of Windows. The game worked beautifully. And need not to say, setting an environment variable doesn’t require rebooting… unlike some retarded operating system.

WINE wins!